"Home, home on the road..."

  By my early twenties, I had become a seasoned road-musician, well on my way to establishing a glowing, forgettable career. It was the mid-seventies and the live music industry was still flourishing in Canada and the USA. A band could travel for months and months at a time spending six nights in this club and then moving on to spend six nights in the next club. Sunday's were reserved for travelling. Our agent just loved getting his ten percent, so he kept us real busy. And club owners discovered that, not only did we "sound just like them fellas on the records", but we also, and more importantly, drank like fish. It seems that the drunker we got, the better we played, and the better we played, the drunker the audience got, and the drunker the audience got, the more money they spent, and the more money they spent, the more the club owner would smile... You get the idea, don't you? It was just one big happy circle with my liver standing in the middle saying, "Ouch!". But, hey; that was life on the road...

   The only real charm the road held was the 160 minutes each night actually spent playing, neatly chopped up into forty minute segments ending in a twenty minute break spent telling lies to little girls that shouldn't have been there talking to me anyhow!!! That's right, girls: I'm the guy your momma warned you about... It never ceases to amaze and amuze me, looking back on it all twenty-five or more years later, what an incredible waste of time it all was. Sure; I still have some yellowed, dog-earred photographs from back then. "Do you remember that gig?" Yeah, vaguely... "Remember this guy? That was a great gig!!!" Sure, if you say so... I had worked with some of the best known shoulda-beens and wanna-bees the Canadian music industry has ever produced. I remember something else from the years on the road, though: staring a hole in the hotel room ceiling in the wee hours of the morning wondering if this was all there was to life and why it didn't seem to make that much difference. It was like a little piece missing somewhere in the middle of my soul that I just couldn't fill with booze or dope or girls or even music. I spent a lot of time writing songs that never came quite close enough to describing that empty feeling, to put the right handle on it. But, hey! Tomorrow's another show in another town; just another day and night on the road.

   History has a funny way of getting you rolling along nicely and then throwing you a curve ball just when you're getting comfortable. Actually, Hollywood decided to throw us all a curve ball...